This year looks set to highlight the contradictions facing disabled people in our society. On the one hand, they are facing increasing marginalisation and discrimination under "welfare reform" policy and public expenditure cuts. On the other, the official rhetoric presents them as the heroes of the forthcoming London Paralympics. This enormous inconsistency is highlighted by paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson's latest warning that disability cuts may well damage our chances in future paralympics, as well as damaging the lives of thousands of disabled people.

Despite this, it's almost as if some of our politicians and media want us to believe there are two disabled populations, one competitive and contributing, the other deviant and dependent. However, what such commentators and their stereotypes may actually be getting seriously wrong is not so much the nature of the disabled population as the size of it.

Policymakers still seem to be treating disabled people as a marginal group with low priority. But the reality is, as the government has itself long been telling us, that this is a group massively increasing in both size and significance. Can we really assume that policy and attitudes will remain the same if that is the case? HG Wells, the science fiction writer, first made the point a very long time ago in his novel In The Country of The Blind. A non-disabled traveller chancing upon a country of sightless people, assumed that in such a land, the "one-eyed man" would be king. Instead, he discovered that it was he who was disadvantaged and so that he was not blinded by its inhabitants to make him "normal", he had to flee.

We only have to do the maths to see how radically the demographics are changing in the UK and indeed other societies. There are already more than 10 million people with a limiting long-term illness, impairment or disability in Britain. The population is projected to rise most quickly for the oldest age groups and it is in these groups that disabled people are most concentrated. The number of people aged 85 and over is projected to more than double over the next 25 years, reaching 3.5 million. This is associated with increasing physical and mental frailty. Current estimates are for massively increased numbers and proportions of people living with dementia. Figures are already being offered that one in three of us will live to be a hundred.

The political focus on disability has been on older people because of policymakers' preoccupations with the "burden of care", but the numbers and proportion of disabled people are increasing all-round, for all ages. This is the result of many factors. More pre-term babies are being born and surviving with major and multiple impairments. People born with impairments are living much longer and those with inherited impairments more often living to have children who may themselves have impairments.

Conditions previously identified as terminal, notably but not only cancer, are now increasingly being reframed as chronic conditions and those experiencing them increasingly being recognised as survivors, although often living with impairments.

The mental health charity Mind already says that one in four of us will experience mental health problems in our lifetime. These problems are now being are identified at an increasing rate, among children, adolescents and adults, with rises expected in depression and anxiety-related conditions, linked with an increasingly stressed, insecure and fragmented society.

Almost one million people are diagnosed as having a learning difficulty and this is predicted to increase significantly.

Major increases are also predicted in so-called "lifestyle disorders" like type 2 diabetes associated with obesity, as well as with increasing problems of long-term alcohol and drug dependence. No less important are significantly increasing, previously unsurvivable life-changing traumas from proliferating wars, terrorist attacks and road traffic and other accidents.

While it might be possible for governments to tinker round the edges of these figures by extending draconian assessments for disability benefits, or cutting back as now on support for children identified as having special needs, we can expect the UK to soon have at least a massive minority of disabled people and possibly even a majority. The fact that UK cities like Leicester may soon no longer have one predominant ethnic group, while California already has an ethnic majority, is already giving rise to major rethinking on issues of race. We may soon have to start doing the same about disability.

It is difficult to imagine that we will still be able to think of social care as a low priority policy and ignore its funding needs, as this recognition takes root. Politicians and the media will find it much more difficult to stigmatise and ignore disabled people as they gain increasing clout. The political realisation will begin to dawn that disabled people don't seem so numerous because more and more people are dishonestly assuming the identity, but rather because who "we" are as a society is changing rapidly, fundamentally and probably permanently. Disability policy may at last get up to speed. The fact that we have recently had two prime ministers with disabled children is perhaps a portent of this change. Soon it will also have to be reflected in as high profile and as positive a way in our politics, as it already is in world sport.